Glass-On Paulo Freires Philosophy of Praxis

level, curricula aimed at empowering young children and developing
their capacities to resist interpersonal bias and promote
equality have been finding wider audiences (Derman-Sparks,
1989; Schniedewind & Davidson, 1998), and more teacher educators
are encouraging critical pedagogical practices among
their students, generating even wider effects (Wink, 2000). 1 The
organic literacies of the working class are being harnessed to
contest the deforming messages of the dominant school culture
(Cushman, 1998; Finn, 1999), and workers are finding critical
literacy skills useful in workplace struggles (Hull, 1997). Social
movements and activists have translated Freire’s ideas into organizing
programs with broad applicability (Arnold, Burke, James,
Martin, & Thomas, 1991; Findlay, 1994). 2 Although systemic
school reform efforts based on Freire’s theory have been limited
largely to the Brazilian context (Freire, 1993; O’Cadiz, Wong,
& Torres, 1998), at least one major project is underway in the
U.S. 3 Beyond all this, Freire continues to be mustered to service
in a wide range of theoretical battles, from the politics of difference,
to cultural studies, to feminism and race matters (Steiner,
Krank, McLaren, & Bahruth, 2000). Interest in Freire’s fundamental
ideas is strong enough to prompt the Harvard Educational
Review to reprint his 1970 seminal essays on cultural action
for freedom (Freire, 1998b, 1998c), and for academic presses
such as Bergin and Garvey, Routlege, Falmer, and SUNY to devote
book series to critical pedagogy. Freire’s life and theory inspire
continuing revolutionary dreams (McLaren, 2000) and a
wide array of transformative programs (see the special issue of
Convergence guest edited by Allman, Cavanagh, Hang, Haddad,
& Mayo, 1998, for a sampling).
Despite the vast panoply of activities and theoretical formulations
that claim allegiance to or derivation from Freire’s theory,
important questions have been raised about its soundness. It seems
that often a blind eye is turned toward these theoretical difficulties,
and instead an adoring gaze treats Freire more as icon and
myth than as a radical philosopher subject to the limits of history
and a necessarily situated perspective (Weiler, 1996). It is true that
Freire took to heart one of Marx’s critiques of Feuerbach—“The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it” (Marx & Engels, 1978, p. 145;
emphasis in original)—and accomplished this point on a scale
honoring Marx himself. However, while Marx’s and Freire’s
legacies are assured in the thickness of life, the durability of their
arguments is far less certain. Freire acknowledged the limits of
his theoretical statements, but steadfastly defended the core of
his theory and juxtaposed inconsistencies in his theory against his
more congruent radical practice and his right to evolve more nuanced
articulations of his view (Freire, 1994b; Freire & Faundez,
1992). Given the Marxian philosophy of praxis at the center of
his theory, Freire’s claim for his practice to be the most telling
basis for judgment has its merits, but this defense does not abrogate
our obligation to examine closely Freire’s analysis. Radicals
do not have the luxury of cursory or idolatrous study of Freire’s
theory since any improvements to it offer possibilities for more
effective struggle, and many theoretical and practical challenges
must be faced in order to realize Freire’s vision and hope.
The remainder of this article sketches the philosophical foundations
of Freire’s view of liberation and education, and presents
some of the critiques that undermine the argumentative structure
of the theory. It outlines a more consistent undergirding for
education as a practice of freedom as “a kind of historico-cultural
political psychoanalysis” 4 and a more defensible “progressive
postmodernism” (Freire, 1994b, p. 55, p. 10) that preserves the
ethical and political thrust at the core of Freire’s ideas. The challenge
is to construct a view that retains the liberatory power of
modernism and its critique of dehumanization, but that recognizes
the malleability and contradictions of identity (at both the
level of the individual and of classes, races, and genders), embraces
the ineliminable epistemic uncertainties and varieties of
reason in our knowing, and respects the plurality of compelling
conceptions of the good which can shape moral and political life.
Insofar as this challenge can be met, Freire’s philosophic legacy
will endure.
Education as a Practice of Freedom:
Freire’s Argument
Freire developed his conception of education as a practice of freedom
from a critical reflection on various adult education projects
he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s (see
Gadotti, 1994, for a review of this emergence). That is, the theory
was part of a praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in
order to transform it” (Freire, 1970, p. 36). At the same time,
Freire’s theory was based on an ontological argument that
posited praxis as a central defining feature of human life and a
necessary condition of freedom. Freire contended that human
nature is expressed through intentional, reflective, meaningful
activity situated within dynamic historical and cultural contexts
that shape and set limits on that activity. The praxis that defines
human existence is marked by this historicity, this dialectical
interplay between the way in which history and culture make
people even while people are making that very history and culture.
Human historicity enables the realization of freedom, opening
up choices among various ways of being within any given situation.
At the level of our being human, freedom can never be
eliminated from existence, while at the level of our concrete practices,
freedom is not a given but is always precarious and must be
achieved. In the everyday world, opportunities to embody freedom
are realized through commitments to struggle for one way
of life or another.
Freire argued that the struggle to be free, to be human and
make history and culture from the given situation, is an inherent
possibility in the human condition. The struggle is necessary because
the situation contains not only this possibility for humanization,
but also for dehumanization. Dehumanization makes
people objects of history and culture, and denies their capacity
to also be self-defining subjects creating history and culture.
These dehumanizing forces reside in both the material and psychic
conditions of persons and situations, so freedom requires
people to engage in a kind of historico-cultural political psychoanalysis.
Freire argues that overcoming the limits of situations is
ultimately an educational enterprise that he calls a practice of
freedom, a permanent form of cultural re-creation that enables
the fullest possible expression of human existence. Further, Freire
holds that democratic socialism provides the necessary conditions
for each person to achieve his or her freedom, to become
fully human.
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EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER